This warning about suspended operations is displayed on a U.S. Geological Survey earthquake webpage. / Screenshot from http://earthquake.usgs.gov

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ON RGJ.COM/DATA

When the federal government shut down, so did access to many sources of information.

The massive federal bureaucracy has piles of data that journalists, teachers, researchers, statisticians and others dig into daily.

Some, like the U.S. Census Bureau, shut down entirely.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics remained opened but warned it may not update in a timely manner. Others will remain open but will not update at all. The National Weather Service remains open and is updating regularly.

Apparently some websites shut down completely because it takes electricity to run the servers that share the data plus routine maintenance is required, something for which there is no money budgeted.

The website Ars Technica, which targets super-geeks, described the decision of which websites to shut down as “bafflingly arbitrary.”

Nevada State Demographer Jeff Hardcastle mines federal sites for data. He said in an interview last week that he was not immediately affected by the shutdown of many federal websites, but it will affect him if it continues.

People will request data from his office, and he frequently uses federal data about income, education and other statistics in the mix and now a lot of it is not there, Hardcastle said.

He has just finished his own estimates for Nevada on age, race sex and Hispanic origin and would like to compare them to the Census Bureau estimates, for example.

Another issue is that he doesn’t keep some files that his office routinely uses because he has always been able to grab them off federal sites when he needed them.